An excerpt from "Chainyballs, Tennis-Ball Lettuce, and
the Breast of Venus Peach: Searching for the Plants of Thomas Jefferson," by
Peter Hatch

Thomas Jefferson's interest in horticulture extended far beyond the casual
efforts of a Virginia gentleman tastefully decorating his table and estate. The
geographic origins of the plants grown at Monticello attest to the reach of
his gardening imagination -- from the Mandan corn and Arikara bean discovered
by Lewis and Clark, to the thirty-five varieties of vinifera, or
European grape, grown in the experimental vineyard; from the upland rice
Jefferson smuggled home from France, to exotic flowering trees recently
introduced from China, such as the mimosa, golden rain tree, and yes, the
chinaberry. When Jefferson wrote that "the greatest service which can be
rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture," he assumed the
role of an aggressive plantsman, and Monticello became an experimental station
of new and unusual introductions from around the world. Probably no early
American gardener wrote about his garden as much as Jefferson. His Garden Book
is a remarkable document, detailing a lifetime of sowing cabbages, harvesting
peas, and manuring asparagus, sketching dreamy visions of romantic grottoes,
and concisely recording the culture of 250 vegetable and 170 fruit varieties.
Thomas Jefferson was crazy about gardening.

When Jefferson referred to his "garden," he, like most early American
gardeners, was referring to his kitchen or vegetable garden. The [Thomas
Jefferson Memorial] Foundation committed itself to the restoration of the
eight-acre garden and orchard in 1979, and to complement the ample
documentation of the site provided by Jefferson's records, an archaeological
crew was employed to trace original fence lines, uncover the garden's
monumental retaining wall, and look for other details that would enable the
restoration to begin. A remarkable discovery was the exact location of
fifty-eight of the original orchard trees, discernible by the dark stains in
Monticello's red clay soil, the planting pattern nearly identical to one drawn
by Jefferson in 1778. The use of archaeology in the landscape raises new
challenges and dilemmas for the gardener. A restoration of the orchard demanded
not only replanting in the precise, newly unveiled locations, but the retrieval
of the specific variety of fruit Jefferson himself planted.

The identification of Jefferson's original planting holes, like the remarkable
revelation of the Elizabethan garden at Bacon's Castle, in eastern Virginia,
provides a clear-cut image of an earlier landscape. Archaeology, however, is a
slow and expensive process. At least at Monticello, archaeological findings
often raise more questions than answers as they relate to documentary evidence.
The identification and even the dating of tree-hole stains is hardly a precise
science. New techniques for the archaeological identification of plant
species, such as pollen analysis and phytolithic investigation, are inexact
when attempting to describe whether a plant is a weed or was cultivated. While
these techniques can often specify the genus of a plant, its species more often
remains a mystery. Also, the process of archaeology, involving the removal of
vast quantities of soil, can obliterate living botanical evidence, such as
seeds, bulbs, even the roots of extant historical material.

The essence of the gardening process involves the deep cultivation of the
soil. Horticulturists are taught to dig a fifty-dollar hole for a five-dollar
tree. Plow scars, the root growth of trees, and planting holes can obliterate
the subtle archaeological evidence in the ground. At Monticello it is a battle
for sacred land that often results in a stalemate. On four different occasions,
in 1790, 1791, 1804, and 1807, Jefferson noted the planting of "clumps of trees
in the four "corners" or "angles" of the house. The clumps, composed of fifteen
to twenty shade and ornamental trees, were an arrangement Jefferson had admired
in England during his landscape tour in 1787, while the corners or angles were
specific areas immediately around the house. It seemed that Jefferson hoped
not only to embower his house in trees, but also to create miniature gardens of
nearly all the botanical elements -- trees, flowers, shrubs -- in an area most
Virginians reserved for the swept yard. Although we know the species of trees
that were planted, and can assume the boundaries of the "corners" with some
certainty, the actual placement of each tree remains a mystery.
Archaeologically stripping the entire area is not realistic or economically
feasible. A re-creation based on a subjective interpretation would perhaps
destroy the stains of the original plantings. The clumps were a clear
reflection of Jefferson's landscape design sensibility, but until technological
advances produce some super X-ray machine that will decipher completely the
past disturbances of man and nature, the architectural face of Monticello will
remain unembowered.

The years of archaeological excavations and the unceasing reliance on
documentation are important at Monticello, for like many historic sites, much
of the original landscape has disappeared. Following Jefferson's death,
souvenir hunters robbed the estate of specimen shrubs, the Grove was reputedly
leveled to create a silkworm plantation of mulberry trees, and the West Lawn
was plowed in order to plant corn. The Levy family, regularly praised for their
efforts in preserving the house from 1836 to 1923, might, understandably, have
been unaware of the need to stabilize terraces, preserve old walkways, and
protect naturalized flower bulbs. The contours of a mountain are easily
disturbed and eroded. Even the Civilian Conservation Corps, working at
Monticello during the Depression, has been accused of robbing the vegetable
garden's retaining wall in order to construct a modern paved road. Often, when
dealing with the landscape, the terms restoration and "tidying up" are
synonymous. Wild shrubberies of escaped plants, awkward terraces, and crumbling
weed-ridden stone walls are easy targets for aggressive maintenance personnel.
The near-removal of the Monticello larch tree, the "old dead pine," is a useful
example of this kind of misguided zeal.